Samsung Galaxy A36 and A56 hands-on review
One UI 7.0 and Android 15
Following in the footsteps of the Galaxy S25 flagship lineup, the Galaxy A-series trio is launching with the latest Android 15 and One UI 7.0 combo. The new UI now has a more modern and simplified look while still focusing on AI and personalization.
While we didn't spend much time with the Galaxy A36 and A56, we can confirm that Circle to search is present, and so is the Now briefing tab and interface. The Object Eraser for image editing and a simple way to make your own image filters (by picking an example image to copy its style) are also present. Auto Trim is interesting as well. It uses AI to effortlessly extract highlights from multiple videos.
You can find a more in-depth look at One UI 7 and all of its features in any of our Galaxy S25 family reviews. Most of the features are carried over from the flagship family to both the Galaxy A56 and A36m except for, say, Samsung DeX.
It is important to note that Samsung is setting a new bar when it comes to the software support cycle for midrangers. Both the A36 and A56 will see six OS updates and six years of security patches.
Benchmarks
Let's start with the Galaxy A36 first. After a mix of Dimensity and Exynos chips in the previous A3X generation, this year, Samsung decided to go with a Qualcomm chip - the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3. It is not a performance beast by any stretch of the imagination, but Samsung gave it the best chance to stretch its legs with a 15% larger vapor chamber this year. Here are some quick stress tests that we ran that clearly show the A36 excelling in thermal stability.
Galaxy A36 stress tests
The base memory configuration is 6/128GB (though some regions will get 8/128GB), and there is an upgrade option to 8/256GB. As we said, unfortunately, the storage expansion slot is gone. The Galaxy A36 uses UFS 2.2 storage chips.
Samsung went in a different direction with the Galaxy A56. This is the first phone to sport the Exynos 1580 chipset, despite Samsung's introduction of the SoC back in October. The 1580 is a major upgrade over its predecessor, giving the Galaxy A56 a big performance advantage over the A55. Here, we have a 2.9 GHz CPU, AMD-based GPU with 2x WGP and an NPU with 14.7 TOPS, meaning performance should be up 37% from last year. As far as we can tell, the Galaxy A56 also has a bigger vapor chamber and offers excellent thermal-throttling behavior from our preliminary testing.
Galaxy A56 stress tests
You can get the A56 with either 128GB or 256GB of non-expandable storage. On the plus side, it uses faster UFS 3.1 chips than the Galaxy A36.
We did manage to run a few preliminary benchmarks during our time with the Galaxy A36 and A56. Keep in mind that the units are running pre-release software. These numbers need to be verified for the full review, but they should still be good enough for now.
GeekBench 6
- Multi-core
- Single-core
Galaxy S25
vivo V40 Pro
Galaxy A56
Galaxy A55
Galaxy A35
Galaxy A36
Redmi Note 14 Pro 5G
AnTuTu 10
Galaxy S25
vivo V40 Pro
Galaxy A56
Motorola Edge 50 Pro
Poco X7
Galaxy A36
Galaxy A35
3DMark - Wild Life Extreme (2160p)
Galaxy S25
Nothing Phone (2a) Plus
Galaxy A56
Nothing Phone (2a)
Galaxy A55
Galaxy A36
Motorola Edge 50 Neo
Reader comments
- atichko
- 2 hours ago
- M{V
Although most probably not bad, these two are again the same boring stuff with the endlessly same, free of any thrills, design. And again both with shiny back sides. I don't get it why a lot of companies always have to put such glass (or plastic...
- N00bie
- 3 hours ago
- 7k{
Yeah,.....encourage the multi billion companies who takes away a convenient, cheaper feature so they can make even more money from you by selling you yet another subscription service.
- Anonymous
- 3 hours ago
- vaS
Where? Everyone is removing them. Most have no local warranty on my area. The insulting part would be Samsung still having both jack and sd card slots on XCover models but do not sell them globally.